Record leasing activity in warehouse property market – report
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Lease agreements for a total of more than three million sqm of warehouse space were signed in Poland in 2016, which is the best result in the history of the Polish market, according to the latest report by JLL. In the opinion of Tomasz Olszewski, the head of the industrial department, CEE, at the company, there is a chance that this year we will see a similar or even higher leasing volume as a number of very large deals are currently being negotiated. The most warehouse space (745,000 sqm) was last year leased in the Warsaw area. Interestingly, the Szczecin area, still an emerging location on the Polish logistics property map, managed to attract two huge tenants in 2016 – Amazon and Zalando leased 161,000 sqm and 130,000 sqm there respectively. Retail chains and logistics operators together accounted for as much as 59 percent of the total net take-up (which amounted to 2.2 million sqm). JLL experts point to the market's ability to absorb the large amount of new space that was completed across Poland in 2016 (1.2 million sqm), which is evidenced by the fact that the vacancy rate in the country stabilized last year and stood at 6.1 percent.
